HOLLYWOOD IN THE FIFTIES
Q: I understand that the frankest book yet about life in Hollywood has been written by someone named Mark Van Doren. Who is he? What is the title of his book?—K.L., LITTLE ROCK, ARK.
A: Mark Van Doren (1894–1972) was a famous poet, literary critic, and professor of English at Columbia University. You undoubtedly are confusing him with Mamie Van Doren, 56, a singer-actress fairly well known in the Hollywood of the 1950s and ’60s.
—“Walter Scott’s Personality Parade,” in Parade.
FOR MARK VAN DOREN, famous poet and literary critic, the fifties in Hollywood were a confusing time, especially after he met Mamie at the home of his friends Donna and John Reed. Mark had just left RKO to go with Columbia after scripting Donna’s It’s a Wonderful Life (based on John’s Ten Days That Shook the World), he was exhausted and disillusioned, and the buxom young star of Untamed Youth and Born Reckless clearly offered something powerful and natural and free.
“Show me things. Tell me. Touch me. You know so much, you’re a poet. I’m a child in the body of a woman. Show me,” she said, as they sat on the railing, looking out across the merciless sunbaked valley toward the Pacific Ocean shimmering like a blue-green afterlife beyond the used-car lots. Just then Donna called from the kitchen, “Do you want a slice of lemon in your nectar?” John was gone—who knew where? The moody hazel-eyed revolutionary had never lived by other people’s rules, not even after marrying Donna. And he hated Mark, after what Mark had done to his manifesto. He vowed to punch Mark in the nose if he ever saw him.
You all know Donna Reed. Well, she was like that, except more so—the World’s Most Nearly Perfect Wife and Mother. She set her clock by her son, Rex, and after he ran away with Vanessa Williams, Ted and Esther’s girl, Donna grieved openly. Her pain hung around her like an old black bathrobe.
Ted’s uncle, William Carlos Williams, could sense Donna’s need to be loved, but he was in town to adapt his epic Paterson for Twentieth Century-Fox, and was writing a large body of water into the script so that Esther, a swimming actress, could be featured. The poet was crazy about his ballplayer nephew’s gorgeous wife. He hung his cap for her. The sun rose and set on her. Whenever Ted was in Boston, W.C. flew to L.A. Esther liked him as a close confidant, but he wanted to be more, much more, to her, so his sudden boyish desire for Donna confused him.
“I’m bad news for any woman I touch,” he told Jeanette and Dwight Macdonald. The former Trotskyite, author of The Root of Man, tugged at his beard as the famous poet stood poised on the tip of the diving board. Burt and Debbie Reynolds looked up at him and so did Carlos and Carroll Baker. Williams held his arms over his gray head, his knees slightly bent. He didn’t notice Lassie and Malcolm Cowley, who had just returned from a walk and stood half shielded by a clump of sumac. “Blouaghhhhh!” W.C. cried as he dove, splitting the water like a fork.
It troubled Mark that Mamie couldn’t swim an inch. He watched gloomily as Esther Williams plowed up and down the length of the pool, just as she did in Williams’ poem “The Singing Swimmer” (“the row of maidens/beside the cool water/and the splashing fountains when/suddenly you/sing in your democratic American voice and plunge/deep below the surface, your white mermaid arms held out to me”).
“Esther swims, why not you?” Mark whispered, but Mamie only laughed. Bertrand Russell glanced up from his chaise longue. “Jane swims circles around Esther,” said the tanned white-haired philosopher in his clipped English accent. The author of Principia Mathematica, from which Peyton Place was adapted by Edmund Wilson’s brother Earl (both of whom made a play for Peyton star Lana Turner after Frederick Jackson Turner, the historian, took a shine to Shelley Winters, Yvor’s ex), laughed harshly as he stood and stripped off his light-blue terry-cloth robe. “And I can take any son of a bitch in the joint,” he snarled, his icy eyes fixed on John and Ford Madox Ford, whose wives, Betty and Eileen, had vanished into the white stucco bathhouse with Danny and Dylan Thomas. “Anytime you like, gentlemen,” he added.
The silence hung in the pale-yellow air like a concrete block. From far away came the mournful hum of rubber tires on the burning highway, a viscous sound like liquids splashing on the grass, and also there was an odor like raisin bread burning in a toaster, except worse. It was a Wednesday. John Ford squinted against the hard light. He cleared his throat, like buckshot rolling down a black rubber mat. But it was Williams who spoke.
He stood, water dripping from his white swimming trunks. “Look at us. Fighting each other like starving rats, while the people we ought to be fighting sit in their air-conditioned offices and laugh their heads off,” he said. “I’m talking about the bosses, the big boys, the playboy producers, the fat-cat choreographers, the directors, the dream-killers. Those are the bastards we ought to be battling, Bert.”
“You sound just like John.”
It was Donna. Dylan stood behind her, blinking, with D. H. and Sophia Loren. And Andy Williams. “Hi, Dad,” Andy said softly. Doris Day, C. Day-Lewis, Jerry Lewis, Lewis Mumford, Neil Simon, Simone de Beauvoir, Patti Page—everyone was there: the whole Rat Pack, except Bogart. Before Bacall, the wiry little guy had been with Bardot, Garbo, the Gabors, Candy Bergen, Bergman, Clara Bow, Teri Garr, but none of them were quite right. They were too different.
“You’re right, Bill.” Mark let go of Mamie’s hand, and she sank like a wet sponge as the trim critic climbed out of the pool. “We’re writers, artists, literary men, not messenger boys,” he said, lighting a pipe. “And just look at us. Look at us.”
“You look like writers,” said Ted Williams, squinting and spitting in that special way of his that his brother Tennessee had tried to copy until his mouth was dry and torn. “You can’t help but look like writers. Because that’s what you are. Writers.”
“I’m as bad as any of the rest of you,” said Dylan sadly. Everyone knew his story, how the sweet voice of the poet was swallowed up in the silent, violent world of gray suits and men with blank empty faces and the watercoolers and the flat beige walls and the uncaring woman behind the desk at the dentist’s who looks up with that empty vinyl expression and says, “Next.” She doesn’t know about your pain. How can she?
“Let’s walk,” said Mark.
Mamie whispered, “Wait. Please.”
“No,” he replied, and the writers left, marching down the long driveway into the dark, the lovely dark, and across town to the airport and back east to teach in college, all of them, and somehow they knew in their hearts and nobody had to say it that when they left, the women they loved would find new men and Hollywood would forget them and never mention their names again, and they did and it has and it doesn’t, and that is the plain honest truth, you dirty bastards.